Doable Holiday Recipes for Your Table from Brys Estate

With winter approaching, it’s time to bring out your soup pot and chef’s knife for a season of comfort cooking. Patrick Brys of Brys Estate Vineyard & Winery in Traverse City shares elevated holiday recipes for your table.

This story was featured in the November 2015 issue of Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine. Get your copy.

Six years after a summer experiment brought Patrick and partner Erick Outcalt from Los Angeles to the then-fledgling family wine estate on Old Mission Peninsula, he is now fully embedded in the business as operations manager and resident gourmand. Driven by the wisdom that his family’s wines are best experienced at the dinner table, Patrick, a passionate amateur chef, has developed a cadre of seasonal recipes that harness the flavors of Northern Michigan’s fields and forests and pairs them with the meticulously crafted wines grown and vinified on his family’s 40-acre vineyard. With winter rapping its cold knuckles on the door, we venture into the kitchen at Brys Estate to get a vintner’s perspective on the joy and community of cold weather comfort cooking.

“Food and wine go hand in hand,” Patrick posits as he pulls a cork from his family’s 2013 pinot noir. The layers of cherry, spice and earth will permeate the braising liquid in his rich preparation of beef short ribs.

“We want our wines to be special and something that people feel proud to share with their guests. When I joined the winery in 2009 I took over our newsletter and started developing recipes that would turn our bottles into a whole experience.” Patrick’s experiential outreach to his hundreds of wine club members has evolved into a comprehensive virtual cookbook on the winery’s website.

While his genuine love of food and strategic marketing savvy drive Patrick’s success he insists his methods in the kitchen are mostly improvisational. “I look for inspiration in cookbooks and local restaurants then go in the kitchen and shoot from the hip,” he explains. “I’m always looking to create fresh, simple, seasonal meals that are sophisticated enough to be worthy of a dinner party but don’t take the whole day to prepare.”

His hip shots, however, are precise and belie an awareness of flavor, texture and presentation. This seasonal sophistication manifests as a tasty homage to autumn in his signature cream of mushroom and herb soup.

With November’s short days and persistent north winds, Patrick likes nothing better than to uncork a bottle of dark and textural cabernet franc and settle into the delights of slow food. “I grew up in Texas and California, so it took me many years to understand the cold weather effect on cooking. Now when I think of winter recipes, I’m thinking comfort,” he says. “I get into richer, heartier foods that braise away all day and fill the house with great aromas.”

To effuse that precious olfactory umami that hangs in every crevice of the house, Patrick’s winter recipes center on proteins that need long, low heat methods. Lamb shanks, short ribs, pork spare ribs and chicken thighs will all find their way into a deep roasting pan or cast iron enamel Dutch oven to slowly melt over a bed of mirepoix or in a rich wine stock. Winter squashes, Brussels sprouts, root vegetables and cauliflower make up the meal’s essential vegetables. Patrick likes them roasted. “A hot oven, olive oil, salt, pepper and a sheet tray are all you need to make magic,” he says.

His delectable magic tricks are impossible without the tools of the trade, however. Patrick insists that aspiring home cooks get properly outfitted with the right equipment and ingredients. He sends people to local kitchen shops like Cutler’s in Petoskey and Mary’s Kitchen Port in Traverse City. “They carry high-quality cookware and, more importantly, have knowledgeable staff to guide you,” he says. On the list of essential gear for comfort food: a good Dutch oven, a stainless steel sheet tray, soup pot, saucepan, extra sharp eight-inch chef’s knife, and an immersion blender for pureeing soups and thickening sauces.

Toeing the line of simple, ingredient-based cooking, Patrick keeps his pantry staples pretty straightforward. “Olive oil, salt and pepper pretty much sums up my spice philosophy. When a recipe has more than eight to 10 ingredients it starts to get overwhelming,” he laments. To keep it real, Patrick recommends high-quality olive oil, both for cooking and finishing applications, chicken, beef and vegetable stocks, fresh peppercorns and the cook’s ultimate currency, salt. “Salt is critical,” he says. “Without it, food tastes pretty bland. For cooking, I prefer to use Kosher salt for its texture, weight and consistency. Sea salt is great for finishing.”

A long-simmered winter stew finished with the finest, hand-harvested sea salt flakes is nothing though without the company of wine, both in the food and in the glass of the chef and his guests. “Our wines are designed to be shared with food, it brings them to life. When you find the right pairing both the food and the wine taste better.”

For Patrick, pairing, like recipe creation, is a relative and approximate science. While some oeno-truisms can always be counted on, pinot noir with mushrooms for example, he’s a big fan of experimentation. “My rule with food and wine pairing is to just try it. Everyone’s palette perceives flavors slightly differently. When testing our wines with our recipes we’ve sometimes been very surprised. An aged white may stand up beautifully to a protein dish and grilled romaine is the best with cabernet franc.”

The art of hearty winter dishes and the magic of food and wine chemistry are foremost pleasures to be shared. “With our pace of life slowed just a little, we have time for this in the winter,” Patrick reflects. “Slow food recipes can be prepped and put in the oven while you straighten the house and open wine. When everyone arrives and has a glass in their hand, the food comes out and it’s something really special; one of the great joys, in fact.

“You have these flavors of the season, of the moment, on your plate; in the other hand, you have a wine produced years in the past that mirrors a different growing season. We all get to sit down together and experience flavors from different points in time.”

Visit Brys Estate Vineyard & Winery

MyNorth.com is the online home of Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine, the flagship publication of MyNorth Media, a Traverse City, Michigan company dedicated to sharing stories and photos about vacations, restaurants, wineries, the outdoors and more from Traverse City to Sleeping Bear Dunes and up to Mackinac Island.